The Moloka‘i Leper Settlement’s problems were all about optics. It was the muckraking papers and the insatiable public appetite. It was sensationalist writers, who cared more to conjure grotesqueries in the minds of their readers than they cared to tell the truth. It was a recent hack story that contained a scene depicting a pack of starving lepers as they besiege the settlement superintendent’s grass hut—on their knees at his door, the diseased and disfigured creatures wail for food while he cowers inside.
“The horrors, as they have been painted in the past, do not exist,” celebrity novelist Jack London declared in the January 1908 pages of Women’s Home Companion, noting that many of these sensationalists devised their tales without ever setting foot on the island. The truth, if they cared to know it, was that Superintendent McVeigh’s “grass hut” was a comfortable wood cottage. London and his wife Charmian had stayed in its finest room when they visited in July of 1907. They’d relaxed out on the veranda, sipping cold drinks and enjoying the fine weather. Had these so-called writers bothered to see the settlement for themselves, they would have been disappointed to learn that there wasn’t a single grass hut on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, and rather than struck with terror, they’d have been surprised when they found themselves having a “disgracefully good time,” along with the lepers, as the Londons had.
Perhaps it was the climate—better, even, than in Honolulu—that made the settlement so pleasant. It had been built on a landmass about a quarter of the size of Manhattan, the remnant of a shield volcano that jutted from Moloka‘i’s northern coast into the open Pacific Ocean. Along the peninsula’s southern flank, the pali hung like a two-thousand-foot curtain from topside Moloka‘i. The very feature that made an overland escape perilous for anyone willing to risk it also kept the climate cool. The pali caught the northeastern trade wind like a sail and sent it sweeping across the settlement’s two villages and its many inland and beachside homes, refreshing the nearly one thousand souls living within them. Though they’d been sentenced to life in exile in one of the most remote places in the world, those souls weren’t much in need or want of anything that the Hawaiian government and the land didn’t already provide. London counted six churches and a YMCA while touring the settlement with Charmian and Superintendent McVeigh. He saw several assembly halls, a bandstand, a racetrack, an athletic club, baseball fields, and numerous leper-owned stores and businesses. At a gathering in Honolulu, just before the London’s sailed for the settlement, Hawaiʻi Board of Health President Lucius Pinkham appeared anxious for London to see the settlement improvements and wanted him to know that the lepers lived quite contented lives on Moloka‘i. “You can’t drive them away with a shotgun,” he’d said. Perhaps Pinkham was right.
Continuing with the tour, Superintendent McVeigh arranged for the Londons to speak with leper fishermen who sold their catches to the Board of Health administration, and leper cattlemen who said they did the same with their beef. They met leper famers. They met leper tradesmen: One leper painter had so much contract work that he employed eight other lepers to help him. The Londons toured leper glee clubs, leper brass bands, and sports clubs. In what would be a more memorable tour stop, the group attended a gathering of the Kalaupapa Rifle Club just as they’d begun a competition shoot for a prize trophy. London observed that the club’s mixed members rubbed shoulders within the confined space of the shooting booth and noted how both the lepers and non-lepers freely shared their rifles. An adventurer and traveler, and the author of the best-selling novels The Call of the Wild and White Fang, London squeezed off a few rounds, too, as did Charmian. Though the natives accounted for ninety percent of the settlement’s population, the Kalaupapa Rifle Club managed to bring together quite a cosmopolitan group, a real show of “the democracy of affliction and the alleviation that obtains,” he wrote. In addition to the Norwegian who sat on the bench beside him and the older gentleman who’d fought for the Confederates in the American Civil War, “strapping Hawaiian policemen, lepers, khaki clad, were shooting, as were Portuguese, Chinese, and kokuas. The latter are native helpers in the settlement who are non-lepers,” he explained. Even the resident physicians, Doctors Goodhue and Hollman, were members. Superintendent McVeigh was not only a member but the one sponsoring the prize trophy that day.
Pinkham’s comment about the lepers’ contented lives might have been an understatement. So much about life in the Moloka‘i Settlement resembled life outside it. In many ways, life on the inside surpassed life on the outside. To wake each morning between the Pacific’s blue expanse and the towering emerald pali was, to London, nothing less than magnificent. Its mountain valleys receding dramatically from the pali face and its open pastures, roamed by hundreds of leper-owned horses, gave one the impression that Kalaupapa was nearer to a heaven on earth than many leisure destinations, never mind the tuberculosis sanatoriums that were the fate of lepers elsewhere. If he were forced to choose to spend the rest of his days in the settlement, or the East End of London, the East Side of New York City, or the Stockyards of Chicago, Moloka‘i would be London’s choice, without debate. Leprosy was a terrible affliction, but the Moloka‘i Leper Settlement was proof that the leper could be contained and still keep his dignity. Contrary to all that had been said and written, exile at Kalaupapa did not represent the terminus of life for the unfortunates who flourished down there.
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All Hawaiʻi’s a stage. This, I think, is what London captures so well in his dispatch. More than lifting the curtain to reveal a tropical island prison inhabited by beastly exotics living strangely normal lives, more than travelogueing modernity’s bells-and-whistles try against an ancient disease, London’s story—“The Lepers of Moloka‘i”—shows how we Hawaiians fuss over our reputation and brand, how we tease and primp our players into their places, and how the show must have always gone on, at least as far back as the summer of 1907, when the Londons played tourist. Decades before Michener got his hands on it and turned us golden, guys like McVeigh and Pinkham were selling a Hawaiʻi story so paradisiacal that even the lepers lived a resort community lifestyle. Despite all that’s said by the insiders about what our story is and who gets to tell it, outsiders get Hawaiʻi right more often than we’d like to admit.
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“The Lepers of Moloka‘i” was the second in a series of pieces London wrote from the South Seas for Woman’s Home Companion magazine. In his first letter, he took readers on a romp in the waters off Waikīkī Beach and introduced them to surfing. Since the turn of the twentieth century, Woman’s Home Companion had been broadening its editorial scope beyond service journalism targeting homemakers—recipes and child-rearing tips—to include general-interest features and short fiction by writers with name value. Circulation increased, as did advertising revenue. Twelve pages of advertising in 1901 grew to seventy-five in 1907, the very year the Londons and a small crew embarked from San Francisco on a highly publicized adventure in the Snark, a forty-five-foot yacht named after a Lewis Carroll-invented animal species. Hawaiʻi would be the Snark’s first stop. From there, it would sail south to the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti, west to Fiji, on to Samoa and, finally, to the Solomon Islands.
“What you want me to give is the healthful, and interesting, and strong, not the unpleasant, decadent, and repellant,” London pitched in a 1906 letter to the magazine’s editor, Arthur T. Vance. He floated story ideas that would feature the domestic lives of foreign peoples, stories that would highlight the roles of women and children in those societies. Woman’s Home Companion readers might want to consume content about the problems and costs of living in those unimaginable settings. They might want to know about South Seas culture, morals, and religion, or what the islanders do for fun, and how they view marriage and divorce. “I shall try to give what will be of interest to your readers,” London promised Vance.
But how would one make the story of a remote leper colony with a hideous reputation palatable for a general readership? How could he address the subject respectfully and fairly, dispelling the false beliefs surrounding the disease while also making the case for the Hawaiian government’s strict segregation policy. How would he show a “happier, brighter side,” of life in Hawaiʻi’s notorious leper colony and still give readers something that was fresh and fun?
“Leprosy is not so contagious as imagined,” London explained to Women’s readers. Had he feared contracting the disease, he never would have spent a week down there, and he certainly would not have asked Charmian to join him. There was no need to practice any sort of distancing when interacting with the lepers, nor did he and Charmian need to wear long gloves. On the contrary, they mingled, getting to know scores of them by name. “The precautions of simple cleanliness seem to be all that is necessary,” he wrote. For example: Upon returning home after a day out and among the diseased, Doctors Goodhue and Hollman simply washed up with mildly antiseptic soap and changed into fresh clothes, the same for Superintendent McVeigh. “That the leper is unclean, however, should be insisted upon,” he continued. “The segregation of the lepers, from what little is known of the disease, should be rigidly maintained.” To shirk this policy was to ignore history’s most important lesson regarding the eradication of leprosy: segregation worked. Rather than cast aspersions at Hawaiʻi’s handling of the leper problem, the world could learn much from it. The Moloka‘i Settlement was proof that sensible public health policies could be achieved without subjecting the leper to the cruel treatment he’d endured in the past. London summarized: “In Moloka‘i, the people are happy.” One need only look at the settlement’s extravagant Fourth of July celebrations, which had been well publicized with full-page, illustrated spreads in the local papers in years past.
The day was given over to games and contests, pageants and performances, and a horse race featuring a cast of multi-ethnics brought equal by their affliction, which would serve as the crowning scene of London’s story. Large American flags flew from the rows of the village buildings and red, white, and blue ribbons decorated their interiors. Everywhere, the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the trade wind. London woke before dawn, and with camera in hand, captured the opening ceremony and what the administration called a parade of Antiques and Horribles, a transplanted custom that had made its way to Moloka‘i from New England. Transforming themselves with monstrous costumes and masks of their own making, the horribles of Moloka‘i capered through the village waving their American Flags while a horribles brass band buzzed out the Star-Spangled Banner on rust-spotted horns. Horribles in top hats and tailcoats strutted beside hooded horribles mounted on donkeys. One horrible—a large shaggy creature made of tangled burlap—rode his donkey beside another whose hat and breeches were patterned after Old Glory, herself.
London had been documenting his stay with a few Kodak cameras. The hundreds of photos, for the most part, look like the kinds of vacation pics that clutter social media feeds. There are snaps of waterfall hikes and parties, and there are shots of those aimless moments between activities. Though he has shots of the disease and its glaring hosts, his Fourth of July images are somehow more haunting than the ones that capture the most ravaged of human bodies by leprosy.
Studying one of the gray Fourth of July images showing several costumed horribles posing for the camera, I imagine London as he positions his subjects, eyeing the distance between his lens and the line of horribles several yards away. He directs a few to move this way, and another to come forward. They’re happy and eager to take direction. They’re used to press visits, by now. Peering down into its coin-sized viewfinder, he steadies his 3A Pocket Folding Kodak against his waist. The viewfinder’s oily glass provides just enough sight for him to arrange the crude forms of his subjects within the frame, and to balance the light and dark elements of the composition. But he keeps glancing up, trying to reconcile what the camera shows with what he sees: The foreground grass will darken when the image is developed, and the pali ridgeline in the background will be washed thin under the glaring sky. If he gets the distance right, the band of horribles, mounted on their beasts of burden and arranged horizontally across the center of the frame, will be in focus. I can see him, motioning to his subjects and, at once, each man sits up and holds his American flag straight. London fingers the shutter latch.
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Women pa’u riders on horseback, July 4, 1907, Kalaupapa
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Joan Didion, writing her own dispatch from a post-Pearl Harbor, post-statehood Hawaiʻi in 1966, made an interesting observation about us insiders. “If they have a stake in selling Hawaiʻi,” she wrote, “and there are very few people left in Hawaiʻi who refuse to perceive that they do have a stake in selling it, they explain why Hawaiʻi’s future is so bright.” In paradise, the future can only be bright. Never was I more aware of this, and of the sell, than when I began to write, and to write about Hawaiʻi, and to write about Hawaiʻi from the inside, having a byline like mine. It has often felt like performing a balancing act high up on the knife edge of a pali ridge while under cannon fire, where a slip could send me tumbling into the depths of caricature.
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Board of Health President Lucius Pinkham loved the early drafts of London’s leper story. Since his appointment by the territorial government, Pinkham had been leaning on the legislature for a bigger budget so that the Board of Health could upgrade the settlement’s staff and facilities and reposition it as a first-in-class, Federal research center with a South Seas view. Commissioning London to write the story represented the soft power aspect of this strategy. Rather than fight the press, it’d be much more fruitful to take control of the narrative. Upon arriving in Honolulu, Pinkham gave London a promotional brochure he’d personally written about the settlement and its segregation policies. The brochure lays out a concise, illustrated overview of the Molokai Leper Settlement’s history, its present state, and its goals. In the final line of the introduction, just before his signature, Pinkham sums up the government’s stance on what the story is to be: “He who seeks sunshine will find and transmit it, and he who chooses to dwell on the dark spots only will so darken his picture it will be untruthful.”
Like Pinkham, Lorin A. Thurston was pleased with London’s work, noting that it was, “of a value that cannot be estimated in gold or silver.” A lawyer, businessman, former politician, and consummate promoter of Hawaiʻi and its industries, Thurston founded the office that would become the Hawaiʻi Visitors & Convention Bureau. By 1907, the graying and stiff-lipped Thurston was closing in on the ten-year anniversary of Hawaiʻi’s 1898 US annexation, and he was five or six years more removed from leading the silent coup that ended the Hawaiian Monarchy in January 1893. He’d overseen the islands’ transition from a monarchical backwater to a modern, twenty-first century US territory. Formally, he’d left behind Hawaiʻi’s political arena but the battle-tested Thurston, grandson of one of the original New England missionary families that settled in the islands, still moved behind the scenes, spending his later years as the owner of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, where he wrote a gossipy column under the pen name Bystander, choosing to shape political opinion rather than engage in outright politics.
So pleased with London was Thurston that he invited Jack and Charmian to vacation with him and his wife on Maui, and to later stay at his Honolulu home. Thurston was a unique character, Charmian wrote in her account of the trip. “There is something imperious in his carriage and backward fling of head, that savours of courts and kings and halls of statesmanship.” His black eyes seemed to frown at uncleanliness and hypocrisy and “absorbed humor at every turn.” On the other hand, she wrote, “Jack is modestly elated because he has succeeded in pleasing both of these men who happen to be far from friendly in the general affairs of the territory.”
Indeed, much of the citizenry believed the Board of Health’s policies to be an overreach. Merely being suspected of having the disease was sufficient cause for local law enforcement to make an arrest. Often, a little rash, caught by a malign or ignorant informant, was all it took to set the governmental gears in motion against its most vulnerable citizens. On each island, suspected lepers were rounded up and penned before being shipped to Honolulu, where they were quarantined until doctors could issue a final ruling. It was common, after testing and observation, that a suspect was determined to be free of leprosy, Superintendent McVeigh had explained to Jack and Charmian, and in those cases the suspect was allowed to return home. However, if a suspect was determined to have the disease, he was given ample time to gather his belongings, settle his affairs, and say his goodbyes. McVeigh wanted Jack to understand that the Board of Health had worked hard to refine the process and management of the leper problem in Hawaiʻi, and that the inefficiencies, as they had existed under the monarchy, had been addressed. McVeigh was referring to the law that had outlawed leprosy since the 1850s, a law the monarchy often ignored, allowing the lepers to live away from the general public in communities of their own making. This was seen by the 1907 Board of Health as a failure of the government’s duty to enforce the laws as they existed on the books.
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The writer on commission inevitably contends with stricture. He embellishes and omits, concedes and misdirects. He deals with the devil. He must consider the innumerable facts that compose his subject’s present and past. He dares to imagine its future. The writer must translate the symbolic and sensory data gained while on assignment into words and ideas that consumers of the final published product will want, and are able, to gobble up, whether they are Woman’s Home Companion subscribers or book buyers forking over $1.50 for the 1903, Macmillan first edition of The Call of the Wild. So much depends on what the public is buying.
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“The Lepers of Molokai” was a healthful, interesting, and strong story, as London had promised Arthur T. Vance it would be. The board of health was portrayed as self-sacrificing while the lepers were shown to live lives approaching normal. In some ways, London wrote his lepers the same way they’re framed in the Kodak shots he sent to be published with his Molokai dispatch: They’re kept at a comfortable distance and rendered without much specificity. He refrains from using overly descriptive language when writing about the physiological aspects of the disease. His discussion of Doctor Goodhue’s surgical procedures remains clinical and he champions the significance of the work. The trauma caused by permanent, state-sanctioned exile is treated lightly, as a necessary evil for which the government gives up a lot of money and sweat trying to get right. In the end, London’s story sticks to the talking points laid out in Pinkham’s brochure.
Kanoelani Hart (case 603), age 22, from Waimea, Hawaii, July 3, 1906
Yet, the discomfort of the assignment made itself known early. “We are not merry, Jack and I,” Charmian wrote in her diary the evening they sailed for Molokai from Honolulu. For the rest of the two-hour, inter-island trip, Charmian had trouble averting her gaze from a particular group of lepers, a “huddle of doomed fellow-creatures amidst their pathetic bundles of belongings on the open, after-deck.” It was enough, she wrote, “to wring pitying emotion from a graven image.”
Pity struck Charmian again while touring the Bishop Home for Girls, when after seeing the playground and classrooms the nuns asked if the Londons would like to hear the girls sing. “Like was hardly the word,” Charmian wrote. She wanted to flee rather than endure the emotional ordeal of that performance. Draggingly, the unsmiling girls presented themselves. Their faces—some bloated, others shriveled—emerged grotesquely from the necklines of their clean holoku dresses. “Every gesture and averted head showed pitious shame over lost fairness,” Charmian wrote, noting one especially sad girl who plinked an awkward accompaniment on an old piano. “But play she did, and weep I did, in a corner, in sheer uncontrol of heartache at the girlish voices gone shrill and sexless and tinny like the old French piano.”
But the Londons had known about the darker side of leprosy in Hawaiʻi before they’d shared a steamer deck with the piteous cargo headed for settlement exile. Even before landing in the islands, they had some understanding of how the territory’s institutional rigidity often turned on the lowest of its citizens, and how all sides ultimately suffered. While en route to Hawaiʻi from California, one of their crewman—a Kauaʻi boy returning home from Stanford University—told the Londons the tale of his father’s murder by a leper named Koʻolau, a skilled paniolo and a crackshot with a rifle. The crewman explained that in 1893 his father had been a deputy sheriff, and that he had orders to root out Kauaʻi’s suspected lepers and plug them into the system that would convey them, ultimately, to Molokai. Facing permanent separation from his wife and son, Koʻolau shot and killed the deputy sheriff when he tried to arrest him, then hid in the Kalalau Valley cliffs with his family. In response, the provisional government dispatched a thirty-five-man platoon from Honolulu to take care of the situation, an outsized show of force, perhaps, just months after the monarchy was overthrown. For two weeks, Koʻolau single-handedly fought back against the advances and Howitzer fire of the soldiers, until the expedition was called off. The family spent several years hiding in the valley, where Koʻolau and his son—who’d been infected by his father—would ultimately die of the disease. After their deaths, his wife came out of hiding and wrote a memoir to tell the tale.
More than a year after touring Hawaiʻi, London published “Koolau the Leper,” a short story based on Kaluaikoʻolau’s valley standoff. Unlike the “Lepers of Molokai,” London’s fictional rendering of leprosy in Hawaiʻi is meant to shock and disrupt. He’s done seeking sunshine, as Pinkham put it, and instead seeks out lines of conflict so that he can wrench them open. Where he smooths and glosses with nonfiction, he hews and splits with fiction. The actual man, Kaluaikoʻolau, is sacrificed—his wife and child and the murder of the deputy sheriff are left out—to serve the grander, thematic, and aesthetic needs of London’s shadow realm. Here, Koʻolau is elevated to the role of a beastly king who has figuratively lost his kingdom to the outsiders, they that “preached the word of God and they that preached the word of rum.” Crowned with a wreath of hibiscus, Koʻolau opens the story with a monologue, a moonlit speech to his leper subjects on the eve of battle against an insurmountable opponent. He is Mel Gibson in Braveheart.
“Because we are sick they take away our liberty,” he says. “They live like kings . . . They who had nothing have everything.”
In fiction, the unfortunate souls who’d contracted the disease are no longer men and women. They are creatures, London writes, who were once men and women but are now “monsters—in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human.” Like the goats that freely roam the craggy cliffs and caves of the valley, Koʻolau’s harpy-clawed and cloven-foot subjects have made this inhospitable landscape their rocky lair. Though they are outgunned, the theater of war is where they will gain the advantage. “Here we have lived,” Koʻolau says. “And here shall we die, unless there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want. They are fit for Molokai.” The monsters grunt and jowl and bellow noises in approval of his speech. They shriek into the night.
When the shooting begins the following day, Koʻolau is all cowboy, using his sharpshooting skills to pick off his opponents as they awkwardly climb toward his position on the ridge. Having won the first battle, he waits for the second in a cave, until an explosion from the valley beach rents the atmosphere and a shell shatters the cliffside above him. He’s shaken. “He had had no experience with shell-fire,” London writes. “This was more dreadful than anything he had imagined.” As the explosions increase and the canons home in on their target, the lepers begin to take casualties. Koʻolau’s people panic. The beastly king is wounded, his best men are killed by artillery, and the rest of them surrender. For six weeks, he is hunted, until the military forces give up and return to Honolulu. London closes the story two years later, showing Koʻolau reminiscing about his life, as a man, before he finally succumbs to the disease that made him a fugitive. “His last thought was of his Mauser,” London writes, “and he pressed it against his chest with his folded, fingerless hands.”
Lorrin Thurston was pissed. He blasted London in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, calling him “a sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man.” London was like the writers who’d come before him, exploiting the pain and shame of a defenseless and sick people while at the same time marring the reputation of an honest, progressive community that had shown him only generosity. “Fiction you know it to be. Fiction we know it to be,” Thurston wrote in his Bystander column. “I ask you, Jack London, to forego the possible profits of further fiction about leprosy in Hawaiʻi, and lend us the powerful influence of your pen in spreading the unadulterated truth.” He signed the open letter, “Your friend…”
“Dear friend,” London replied in a letter that Thurston published in the Advertiser. “I think Hawaiʻi is too touchy on matters of truth.”
